Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  “I know,” I tell him. I’m trying to keep him quiet, at least until we get outside. Things have been escalating between the two of them, Acosta and Harry. Two earlier confrontations resulted only in stern warnings from the bench, a dressing down in public court, in front of Harry’s clients.

  Hinds, for reasons I do not understand, perhaps he is just too stubborn, refuses to affidavit the judge, and the Coconut loves it.

  I ran into Acosta’s bailiff in the courthouse lobby on my way over here. He couldn’t resist giving me his version of the details in a crowded elevator. “Hinds was back-talkin’ the judge,” he tells me. “Judge Acosta had no choice.” This according to a man who does everything for Acosta including occasional spit-shines on the judge’s pointy little wing-tip brogues.

  What happened was chronicled by the court reporter in the record, the version I used in obtaining the release order from the Court of Appeal.

  Acosta had set Harry up with some bullshit rulings on evidence. This is one of the Coconut’s specialties. Harry’s objections were each hammered down from the bench, rejected by the court. Hinds sprayed Acosta with a few well-chosen insults. Harry says these were expressed under his breath. “Private thoughts,” he now calls them, like the Coconut somehow invaded his privacy by overhearing these.

  Harry gets a little sympathy from me on this. Though some of his more descriptive terms for Acosta might be considered statements of fact by those who know the judge better.

  Harry says Acosta has an acute sense of hearing. Unfortunately for Harry the court reporter also had good auditory senses. It seems some of the juicier excerpts from his secret musings ended up as part of the court’s record.

  In the end Harry was ordered to pay a $300 fine. There is no dispute about what happened after that. Hinds reached into his pocket, peeled off five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills from a gaudy money clip he carries. He approached the bench and plunked these up high on the wood by the judge’s gavel.

  Without being there, I know Acosta must have had fire in his eyes. He is no grocery clerk trained to cashier money. But the judge couldn’t resist one last shot. Looking at the little pile of bills he told Harry: “You must have learned to count at the same place they taught you your manners, Mr. Hinds. I said three hundred.”

  Harry looked up at the bench, then told Acosta: “Credit it to my account, your honor. I’m not finished yet.”

  Acosta ordered him to jail for thirty days. This was clearly excessive, an argument with which the Court of Appeal has now agreed. Even an insult to the Coconut’s imperious pride does not warrant thirty days in the Capital County slammer.

  “You owe me one,” I tell Harry.

  “Tell you what, you shoot the prick and I’ll defend you—free,” he says. Harry’s talking about Acosta.

  I’m glad that we’ve cleared the jail. Threats against judges, even those in jest, don’t go down well with the local constabulary.

  Harry is now checking his wallet, counting the cash that was there when he was booked, bill by bill. Such is his trust of the cops. Jail does not seem to have shaken him much. I think that, like the Man of La Mancha, Harry sees this little episode as part of some noble quest.

  The usual throng of humanity is gathered on the steps outside the jail. These are mostly relatives, or significant others of those inside, deciding whether to spring for bail, or to pay next month’s rent.

  Harry and I make our way through this army of jailhouse regulars and onto the sidewalk in front of the building. We head toward my car a block away.

  Hinds is grousing that he needs a shower. It seems he could not bring himself to use the communal things offered in the jail.

  “After all these years I’d like to remain a virgin,” he tells me. Like most defense attorneys, even Harry has his standards. Defending these people is one thing, showering with them is something else.

  I tell him we’ll pick up some clothes at his place on the way. He can shower and shave at the house before dinner. My wife, Nikki, will thank us for this thought.

  Harry falls behind, finally stopping at the newsstand on the corner. He joins the little mob hustling the vendor for a paper. He hits me up for four bits. It seems the jail budget doesn’t include a daily newspaper. Harry wants confirmation that the world has carried on without him for the past forty-eight hours.

  “I’ve got to pick up Sarah at the babysitter’s in ten minutes,” I tell him.

  “It’ll just take a minute,” he says. Harry burrows his way into the loosely formed line, not in the British fashion of properly queuing-up, but with head down, right shoulder used as a wedge. Harry in line is like a mole in rutting season. My guess is he’s after the sporting green. He’s probably placed bets on the pay phone from the jail. He shoves the guy next to him in line a bit. The fellow gives Harry a dirty look, then focuses on me like maybe I’m Hinds’s trainer for this bout.

  This face staring at me is something from the past. We each stand there. One of those awkward moments. He is older, but I suppose he would say the same of me.

  After ugly seconds of silence, he says: “Mr. Madriani. A long time.”

  There is nothing overtly hostile in this. But his tone tells me that if he had his way, he would nudge me off the curb, under one of the fast-moving buses now churning by in the rush hour.

  We stand there, Harry lost in his paper. I’m not sure whether I should introduce them. The mixture of Adrian Chambers and Harry Hinds could be volatile.

  “It’s been a few years,” I say.

  “Ten to be exact,” he says.

  I’ve not seen Adrian Chambers since his conviction for suborning perjury, and his removal from the practice of law. In his late forties, he has aged well beyond those years. Of the hair that I remember, generous brown waves, he now has only a gray fringe ringing his head above the ears. This is cropped close to the head, military style. He is, after all, a former marine. Around his forehead there are the subtle shadows, a few age spots like amoebas creeping under the skin. In the handful of times that he has graced me with it, I have seen a tight-lipped thin smile. It always had the appearance of being forced. It is not that the man is without humor so much as that his chief amusement comes from denigrating others. Adrian is a bundle of scorn, tightly strung.

  After all these years, if I were to pass him on the street I might not recognize him at all—except for two abiding features, his penetrating dark eyes, cold as steel, and a hard athletic body, the lean and mean obsession of a former gyrene. Studying him here as we each take the other’s measure, I note that Adrian Chambers looks like nothing so much as Robert Duvall’s incarnation of the Great Santini.

  “They tell me you left the DA’s office.” He says this like he’s been asking questions about me.

  “Some time ago.” He’s talking about the Capital County District Attorney’s Office where I haven’t worked in more than a decade.

  “That’s too bad. I was looking forward so, to seeing you in court again,” he says. “I’ve waited a long time.”

  “I still get there,” I tell him. “I’m just on the other side now, at the defense table,” I say.

  “Oh, but it wouldn’t be the same,” he says.

  I am giving him puzzled looks, like what difference could it possibly make to a disbarred lawyer.

  “The place is open to the public,” I tell him. “Come, sit in the audience. Hiss if you like.” I give him a little grin like this unpleasant conversation is coming to an end.

  Harry has found what he was looking for in the paper. From his look he could have saved himself the effort, and me fifty cents.

  “Oh, they didn’t tell you?” says Chambers.

  He waits for me to say something, but I don’t bite.

  “I’m practicing law again. I thought they would have told you, of all people,” he says, “being that
you took such a personal interest in my case.”

  I think my vacant gaze gives him some satisfaction, that I am hearing this for the first time.

  “Oh yes, several years now,” he says. “Contrary to popular belief, there is life after disbarment. The state supreme court says I’m rehabilitated.”

  “Ah.” I would congratulate him, say that I was glad to hear it, but it would be a lie. What’s worse, he would know it. It is this suspension from the practice of law, more than anything else, even the time spent behind bars, that I think is the basis of his animus toward me. Chambers spent nine months in the county jail, courtesy of an indulgent judge at sentencing. Though his crime was a felony, the court took note of the fact that he was a lawyer, one of the fold, with no prior history of wrongdoing. Special rules for special folk. A non-lawyer for the same offense would have done hard time, I think.

  “Practice isn’t quite the same,” he says. “A little smaller, less ambitious,” he says. What he means is not like the days of yore, before the Walter Henley case, when he had a dozen associates in a high-toned office across from the courthouse, and a partner who walked off with everything when Chambers was jailed.

  Harry has finally tuned in to our conversation. Standing beside me, Chambers looks at him. Since Harry is in a wrinkled suit and has a stubbled face, I am sure Chambers takes him for one of my clients, and my practice for something seedy.

  “Oh, no hard feelings,” he says. “I want you to know that I don’t harbor grudges. What happened, happened,” he says. “Water under the bridge,” he says. “Just one of those things,” he tells me.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Let bygones be bygones,” says Harry. “Forgive and forget.” Harry wrinkles his eyebrows, trying to think of a few more. “Bear no malice,” he says. “Bury the hatchet. Blessed are the meek,” he says.

  Chambers looks at him, like who is this asshole?

  Not one to leave him in doubt, Harry sticks out his hand. “Harry Hinds,” he says.

  Chambers looks but doesn’t touch.

  “Forgiveness is good for the soul,” says Harry. “Do hard time, did you?” Hinds is cultivating him. I think he senses commercial opportunities, maybe a future client.

  “No.” Chambers looks at him with an expression you might reserve for something run over on the road. “And you?” he says.

  Harry looks down at his suit coat, wrinkled and dirty, like something the homeless would wear. “Oh no,” he says. “Just trying to crack the Coconut,” says Harry.

  Chambers’s expression is quizzical. He is wondering, I think, if maybe Harry’s run afoul of a local ordinance designed to protect palm trees and their fruit.

  “But I commend your attitude. It’s the first step toward rehabilitation,” says Harry.

  “And what’s that?” says Chambers.

  “Honest remorse,” says Hinds. “It works good at sentencing, too. It’s what I tell all my clients.”

  “That so?”

  I’m sure, knowing Chambers, that he can, just like Harry’s clients, switch this on and off, his remorse, at will. It is no doubt how he regained his ticket to practice law.

  Chambers smiles at me, lips tight as banjo strings. “See you around.” He says this as if he means it, like perhaps I should pay more attention each time I walk past an alley.

  “I doubt it,” I say. “I’m a little busy, nursing an assignment elsewhere right now.” I try to quell any rising expectations of revenge.

  He looks at me, a steely-eyed smile. “We’ll be seeing each other,” he says. One last contemptuous look at Harry, and Chambers is gone, down the street.

  In his day, Chambers had done some heady cases, mostly white-collar stuff, though he has seen the seamier side of crime as well. He defended to a standstill the prosecution of the White Angels a decade ago, a group of Aryan thugs charged with the murder of a black man on the fringes of Oak Park. In his abrasive courtroom style he drew the wrath of the cops and the city’s prosecutors. He also won, which in Adrian Chambers’s book, is all that counts.

  “Delightful guy,” says Harry. “A little like Hitler, but without the charm.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “with Adrian Chambers, his mouth’s a dead giveaway.”

  Harry looks at me.

  “You know he’s lying when you see his lips move.”

  By the time we reach the house, Nikki is so angry she is not talking to me. We were late getting to the babysitter, and Nikki was called from work to pick up Sarah. I know my wife well enough to recognize her look when I get to the house, a gaze that seems to see right through me as if I am nothing more than a hole in space.

  “How are you, Harry?” She takes his coat.

  “Fine,” he says. “I’m doing fine.” She turns her back on me, leaving me on the stoop outside. Harry gives me a sideways glance, something that says maybe he’d be more comfortable in jail tonight.

  “Mmm, smells good.” He puts a face on it. Odors from the kitchen are wafting out toward the front door.

  “Sure does,” I say.

  Nikki gives me one of her “drop dead” looks, turns and heads back toward the kitchen. At least she has acknowledged my presence. The first step in the long road to redemption.

  In the last weeks the stress here at home has been palpable, ever since I took on the Davenport assignment. I have tried to assuage Nikki, offering to boost the housekeeper to once a week. I even tried to take part of the load, some household chores from her. The laundry became my province, washing, drying and folding. But the art of bleach put an end to this. Nikki took this task back after a few weeks when our underwear began to take on the gray-cast of the Confederacy.

  These days Nikki is haggard, trying to handle a job and home, being both mother and father to Sarah, worn to a fine edge because I have taken on too much at my own job.

  “Daddy. Daddy.” Sarah bounds down the hall and into my arms. “Guess what I did in school today.” She has dark hair kept short in a Dutch cut, and oval brown eyes the color of rich coffee. A few transparent fawn-like freckles dot the bridge of her nose, and wonder dances in her every expression. Kindergarten is a new and daring adventure each day for my daughter. In the afternoon she rides the bus with the high school girl down the street, the coolest thing since Barbie. As a result she talks constantly about all the homework she has to do and puts on a fatalistic expression that is comic in its efforts to look grown-up. Then she’s off to the playroom for hours of self-important scribbling on reams of binder paper.

  It is the first night this week that I have arrived home at a sufficiently early hour to see her still awake.

  She is pulling me like a little tugboat with her full hand around my forefinger down the hall now. “Look at what I did, Daddy. Look what I did at school.”

  “Just a minute,” I tell her. “I’ll look at it in a second.”

  Nikki asks Harry if he’d like something to drink, beer, wine, a soda.

  “A beer would be great,” he says.

  “Let me get that, honey. You’re busy.” I try to press past my wife to give her some help, a mild effort at amends.

  In a move that would rival the queens of roller-derby, she gives me a hip in the side, sending me past the refrigerator door and halfway into the hall, the leverage of the female center of gravity. She grabs a single bottle of Coors from the rack on the door and slams it closed. Two seconds later she is handing this to Harry, the head frothing up in a tall, frosted pilsner glass. It is her way of telling me that as far as she is concerned, I can die of thirst. I begin to wonder if I’m eating tonight.

  Finding myself in the hallway in the semi-darkness by the phone, I stand there for a moment to collect my thoughts. This day is not turning out well—first a reunion with Adrian Chambers and now this. I pull the phone book from the little shelf under the phone and look i
n the yellow pages under “Attorneys.” I am curious as to where Chambers is hanging his shingle these days. There is no listing. I look at the date on the book. No doubt it was published before Chambers was reinstated.

  I turn to the white pages and look under his name—a single entry in bold type for a commercial listing:

  Adrian Chambers

  A.C. Associates

  Limited Partnerships—Business Consultants

  I suspect that it was during the time when he was high and dry, without a ticket to practice law, that formed the genesis of “A.C. Associates”—any way to turn a dollar.

  I close the phone book and drift back into the kitchen. Nikki looks at me with a gaze that could stop a charging water buffalo.

  “Why don’t you take some time with your daughter,” she says. “Look at her schoolwork?” she says to me.

  I match her look for look. My own hostility is starting to build. I move toward the couch and Sarah.

  Harry, sensing the onset of domestic discord, has lost himself in the din of the television set, channel surfing with the remote.

  I sit on the couch in the family room while Sarah pulls wrinkled and folded pieces of construction paper from her plastic backpack, the one with spots like a Dalmatian. I unfold these and begin to decipher letters and numbers, in no apparent order, printed large, block-style in various colored crayon. The numbers appear fine. The letters look like they’ve been copied from images in a mirror, they are nearly all backwards.

  We read these together. She struggles and guesses at a few.

  “Very good,” I tell her. “Good job.”

  She smiles at me big and broad as if to burst with satisfaction, little tiptoeing jumps, unable to control herself, overflowing with energy.

  “She’s coming along,” I tell Nikki.

  My wife turns to look at me, a cold expression.

  She has been on the rampage for more than a month, ever since my decision to help Mario Feretti, to immerse myself in the Putah Creek cases.